Jugoslav Vidic, pictured in an undated official photo, recently admitted in federal court to living in Ohio for more than 20 years after fraudulently obtaining a U.S. green card by concealing his past as a convicted war criminal from the former Yugoslavia. (24 SATA News)
A convicted Serbian war criminal this week admitted in federal court to escaping justice and living in Ohio for two decades after obtaining a green card by lying to U.S. immigration officials.
Jugoslav Vidic, 55, confessed to concealing a war crime he committed during the Yugoslavian Civil War, the Justice Department said in a statement Wednesday.
Vidic said he had never been charged with breaking “any law” in his immigration paperwork in 2000, despite fleeing a Croatian court conviction.
He received permanent resident status and a green card in 2005. He lived in suburban Cleveland, Ohio, where he worked in his former occupation as butcher and sausage maker.
Vidic was a Serb Army of Krajina soldier during the civil war in the former Yugoslavia.
On immigration documents, Vidic only claimed a one-year term of military service in the Yugoslav People’s Army before the country’s breakup, the Justice Department said Wednesday.
In the summer of 1991, two months after Croatia declared independence from Yugoslavia, ethnic Serb forces besieged Petrinja, Croatia.
Vidic was part of a notorious paramilitary unit known as the “Red Berets,” and he was implicated in the killing of his former factory co-worker and noncombatant Stjepan Komes.
Vidic had seen his ex-colleague shaking hands on television with then-Croatian president Franjo Tudjman during a visit to Petrinja.
In apparent revenge for this perceived sign of solidarity with Tudjman, Vidic led his former co-worker out of the building at gunpoint and cut off his right hand with a butcher’s knife, according to court records.
Komes was never again seen alive and his body was later exhumed from a mass grave, according to a Justice Department indictment.
Vidic was convicted for a war crime against civilians in absence in 1998 but escaped across the Atlantic before his arrest.
In the more than 23 years after his arrival in the United States, Vidic ran a small business making Balkan-style sausages that once ran afoul of U.S. health regulations. He also faced accusations of a pattern of sexual harassment by fellow employees of a supermarket where he worked in the meat department, according to court documents. Vidic denied the accusations and his employer settled a lawsuit, according to Cleveland.com.
It was Komes’ son, Tomislav Komes, who located his father’s killer in North America 32 years later, after a tip from a fellow Croatian who met Vidic in America, Croatian media outlet Maxportal reported in January.
Vidic resurfacing in the U.S. unmasked a narrative of war crimes and subterfuge in Croatia, where online news site Sata 24 dubbed the escaped convict the “executioner from Petrinja.”
“I can’t imagine what kind of mentality it is, what kind of person it is,” Tomislav Komes told Croatian television news Dnevnik Nova after Vidic’s arrest earlier this year. “War operations are something that is legitimate and clear, there are victims, but this kind of brutal torture, cutting off a civilian’s hand, is something that even today, after 30 years, I cannot understand.”
Vidic entered a plea agreement that included his deportation and is scheduled to be sentenced on his immigration fraud charges in May.
“Vidic will serve prison time and then be removed from this country,” acting assistant attorney general Nicole Argentieri said Wednesday in a statement. “His conviction demonstrates that no human rights violation is too distant for the Justice Department to seek accountability.”
